The Book of the Lion (11 page)

When Wenstan brought us each a dish of smoky, oily ham, he spoke in a low voice. “I have never seen Sir Nigel so displeased,” he stammered.

“Will we stay chained here forever?” asked Hubert, with no self-pity but with an urgent, personal curiosity.

“Forever?” asked Wenstan. He considered—or perhaps he paused because of his stammer. “Nothing lasts so long.”

“What happened to my cape?” I heard myself croak.

“That rag you were wearing?” said Wenstan airily. “It has been returned to its rightful owner, along with the money.” Wenstan had trouble with the last word. “The money,” he repeated. “The coins you stole.”

“I stole nothing,” I said, in my most knightly voice, but inwardly I crumbled.

“The night watchman,” said Wenstan. “He recognized the purse.”

 

 

 

 

I found the water barrel and drank deeply, scoop after scoop, until Hubert stepped in to lead me away.

Nigel affected not to see, standing with his hands on his hips by the tiller, a man challenging the weather to attack. Rannulf did not spare us a glance, working with Miles on his weapon kit, polishing his short sword and oiling the seams of his chain mail. The sailors would not meet my eyes, and I felt like Jonah, a man who brought such bad luck to his shipmates that he was fed to a giant fish.

Venice had vanished. A black range of cloud jutted from the north. The ship wallowed. The sea puckered and dimpled, but no waves lifted and the wind was dead. The air was warm, and scented with the smell of decay, almost sweet, although the nearest land was a bare hint far to the west.

We carried a cargo of pigs and horses, and enough other beasts to populate a farm. The unfamiliar steeds rolled their eyes and screamed through their noses, hysterical and dangerous to anyone who mis-timed his approach. The pigs were more phlegmatic but equally vocal, questioning, protesting. Their odor was bitter and very strong.

We had a few new passengers, too, among them a canon priest from Padua named Father Urbino, who sat with a leather bucket beside him. He emptied the contents of his stomach with the regularity with which a clerk dips a quill in ink. A, big, blond man, he had three rings on his fingers, one a pink coral carved into a sacred image, the other two pink gold.

Christendom was attended by ordinary priests, who lived under one roof, and traveling priests, who were free to walk the land. Such traveling priests were often scholars and the sons of gentlemen, and so I appreciated the kind smile Father Urbino gave me. A few Frankish knights had joined us as passengers, too, along with their squires. The deck was a jumble of ration bags and lances.

The duty was punishment, but I was happy to be around the animals. Hubert and I bucketed salt water over the feces and urine of these bleating, squalling creatures. Our own horses, including Shadow and Winter Star, heard the newer animals snorting and joined the chorus.

The sailors swung mauls, large wooden hammers, pegging down hatches. Scoops and pails, rope and awl, any tool or tether that was not lashed or stowed was spirited away into the hold, which was already filled with sacks of wheat flour, oats, and cubits of hay.

Partly out of anxiety about what I saw in the sky, and partly to discover Nigel's humor, I said, “Hard weather is descending,” in what I thought was a seaman-like turn of phrase.

Sir Nigel did not look my way, leaning against the side of the ship, paring his thumbnail with a small and shiny blade. “What a foul smell swine have,” he said over his shoulder to Rannulf.

Rannulf made no comment, at work on his shield strap, kneading it with oil. Miles sat with him, soothing a whetstone across the blade of a knife with an ivory handle. I envied Miles at that moment, garbed in the same dark cloth Rannulf was wearing.

“I owe you and all aboard this ship my humblest apologies, and I beg, unworthy though I am, your mercy.” This was my speech, and I had prepared it with care. I knelt on the deck.

“The cape and purse belonged to a nephew of the Doge,” said Nigel. “The duke, the lord of Venice—you took his nephew's silver.”

The lord duke has a bitch's whelp for a nephew, I wanted to say “I mistook him for another sort of man entirely,” I said.

Nigel stopped paring his thumbnail and gave me a look of keenest interest, as though an ox had uttered a proverb. “You judged a duke's son and found him wanting?”

I cautioned myself to be the perfect squire—in speech, if not in deed.

“They would have kept you in chains,” said Nigel, “but Captain Sebastiano and I convinced them to forgive an errant Crusader.”

 

Father Urbino wished me a good evening in heavily accented English. “She goes well,” he said.

The ship, I assumed he meant. He spoke as a man greets his social inferior, politely but with simplicity. “Yes, Father,” I agreed, “she goes very well.”

Father Urbino glanced around, like a man accustomed to a servant. I took the slop bucket from his hand and emptied its contents over the side.

Actually, the ship was not going very well at all. The air was sultry, and the ship lolled and lurched slowly in the dull sea.

“We will arrive in time to kill many,” said Father Urbino. He made a stabbing twisting gesture with an imaginary sword. “Many heathen.”

I had often wondered what it was like to have a vision of Heaven. Did the beings in the presence of God have bodies like ours, or were they made of light and color? A nobleman could have asked a priest like Father Urbino, and the good Father would have spent hours explaining the celestial host.

I scrubbed and washed the deck, mopped and dried the planks, and then scattered dry straw. I was sweating like a man stunned with fever, like my poor father and mother, in their last illnesses. I did not like to draw a deep breath, the air sick-sweet, like burning sulfur.

The sea slackened completely, like canvas stretched across a floor, irregular as wrinkles passed through it.

Winter Star whinnied, and I called to silence him. The horses stirred and settled behind their wooden enclosure, and a pig set up a low-voiced conversation, swine speech that was nearly human, curious and apprehensive.

 

It struck just after sundown.

One moment we chewed duck bones and bread, and drank a sweet green wine, the ship still and quiet in the water. And then a single rope on the mast began to stir. It fell from its knot and swung, twitching.

It was only rope, I thought, and soon a sailor would lash it back into place. But the blind rope end searched and probed, a restless serpent. Surely, I thought, someone will see it. Surely it means nothing, this single restless thing on a stagnant sea.

The rope was swinging, idle but unceasing. and the next instant the vessel yawed, plunging. She rolled to her side. The rigging shrieked.

The rope whipped through the dark. It caught a sailor in the skull, and the man went down spinning across the wet deck. I seized the wild rope and held it. I called for help. As a wave burst over the ship, my grip on the rope was all that saved me.

Two sailors joined me, clinging to the knot, and then Miles, skittering and falling, slid across the deck, into the foaming scuppers. And over, into the sea.

A dozen men cried out. The ship's stern swung wide, and the
Sant' Agnese
staggered, broadside to the force of the storm. Sheep and pigs fell hard against their enclosures, horses struggling.

Sailors struggled to their posts, figures hunched and featureless in the dark. I wrapped my arms around the mast and hung on. Someone climbed toward me along a man-rope across the deck. It was Nigel, and he put his lips to my ear and yelled, “Help with the oar!”
Holp with the loof.

“Miles is gone!” I cried.

I could hear Nigel call something, his hot breath on my ear, but I could not make it out.

“Miles is in the water!” I cried.

Nigel's features streamed, rain and brine.

Men wrestled with a great oar, more massive than the normal tiller, struggling to work the implement through the tiller-lock, and into the sea. The Genoan, for all his size, could not manage it, and the other sailors, strained and pulled, no more capable than monkeys.

I took a grip on the large tiller-oar, and we all strained to steer the ship stern to the wind, as seething water tumbled, threatening to roll her over.

As I turned my head, with effort, I saw Miles, waving, vanishing and waving, closer than before, his mouth a gash.

Later I told myself this wasn't possible. The night was too dark, my eyes burning with salt. Surely this was another apparition, yet another shadow in our wake.

Besides, what spar or wine cask could I throw him? The deck was stripped of everything not tied down, and as I called for Miles, another figure tumbled into the sea, a sailor. I was certain a sailing man would be able to swim, and I called out encouragement, my voice a shriek.

A hand lifted from the stewing water like a farmer, bidding on a prize ewe.

At that last moment, I thought: I know that face, that shoulder, those fingers reaching upward.

And then he, too, was lost.

 

 

 

 

We took turns at the storm-tiller, Nigel and Rannulf joining me, each of them stouter than most of the sailors. Following seas climbed over her, and the
Sant' Agnese
trembled and staggered under the weight.

Hubert took his turn at the tiller with the rest, but he was not stout enough to make much difference. At one point in the long night one of the animal pens shattered, cut down by a heavy wave. Boards and corner-shafts flew, and starbursts vanished into the wind—hens and ducks. Sheep scattered, legs out, rolling, bleating, failing to find any purchase on the slick, heaving deck.

I shivered, gripping hard when it was my turn at the tiller again, and at last, as dawn was breaking, the sky begin to lift. Tatters of dark cloud hung down, the storm dissolving, sunlight lancing.

But the seas remained heavy, and at last Rannulf and I were together, clinging to the tiller. I hung on with a stony stubbornness, but Rannulf leaned into the oar as though he took pleasure in the strain.

I wanted to offer condolences at the loss of his squire, but his bearded face was forbidding, his eyes on some far-off point.

Horses soon forget.

Hours of sunlight and calm winds, and Winter Star accepted my caresses and a feedbag of oats. For Winter Star, nothing troubling had ever happened. More than half our livestock had vanished, however, and the pigs discoursed, querying me as I walked among the horses, insisting on my attention. I gave their bristly swelling bodies a pat, their skin pink and wrinkled under the wiry white-and-brown hairs. The pigs chewed bread crusts and fish heads, contented with what human stomachs had not been able to take in.

I found that Miles's clothing fit me, cut at the sleeve, and stitched, as one of the sailors was pleased to do. I knew that I wore a dead man's kit, and heard a dead man's song in my soul, the lay of a man dressing like a fox to creep closer to his lady's doves. Such songs are so often of unfaithfulness, encouraging the married baron to dally with some duchess across the dale.

I wore Miles's knife. The ivory-handled blade fit in a scabbard Hubert gave me, leather from the skin of a mare, a gift I felt unworthy of accepting.

Men do not forget so soon. Father Urbino spoke the noble Latin, praying to God for the rest of the souls of our brothers Miles de Neville and Matteo Mattei, the big sailor from Genoa. It was not a formal requiem, simply a brief address to Heaven. Only a few of the sailors were able to gather. Two were joint-wrenched, injured by falls during the storm. A few had a flux, black water in the bowels.

Father Urbino was a wraith, unshaven, shadows around his eyes, his
Spiritui Sancto
a thin, quavering tenor.

“With your pardon, Father,” I said, holding out my hand. I dropped a gold ring into his palm, and as he stared at it in wonderment I closed his fingers around it.

Gold is sunny and warm. It does not tarnish in a night, and the goldsmith taps his hammer lightly, melts his bullion easily. Gold is agreeable, easy of love, and for all this I prefer silver.

“It fell, Father,” I said. “From your finger.”

“My fingers—they grew thin and wrinkled overnight,” he said. “Many thanks!”

“The day—the wind the sun—will be good now,” I said, in the childish formal talk we use with children and people who do not share our tongue.

“Good to us, bad to God's enemies,” said Father Urbino.

Wenstan could barely make a sound. When I put my arm around him he merely turned away, and gazed down into the wake of our ship. The storm-tiller had been replaced by a more slender device that cut the sea like a butcher's knife.

“I despised him for his songs,” stammered Wenstan. “But now—” He took a deep breath. “Now I miss him like a brother.”

“We'll kill a hundred Infidels in vengeance,” I responded.

Wenstan offered me a pained smile.

“Tell me of the wonders of the Holy Land,” I suggested, to take his mind off his sorrow.

He shook his head.

I beseeched him, and he shrugged. “They have the True Cross in Jerusalem,” said Wenstan, in a soft voice.

I leaned close to hear him.

“The pagans have it,” he continued, speaking carefully to still his stammer. “And they will not let it free to the Christians. That's one of the reasons we are called there.”

“But surely there are bits of the True Cross in England,” I said, happy to hear him talk of some sunny subject.